The media must never allow its role as the eyes and ears of society be corrupted by ideology, writes JOHN WATERS
IT WILL probably surprise you to learn that the subject of my column here last Friday – the discovery by the young Irish parents of a five-year-old son that they are half-siblings – generated global interest. This saga, of how the Irish family courts damaged three generations of two Irish families, made headlines in the UK, the US, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey and numerous other countries around the world.
Only one Irish newspaper, the Irish Mail on Sunday, for which I also write a weekly column, followed up the story. Last Friday morning the editor of the paper, an Englishman, phoned, said he found the story astonishing and asked if I would put him in contact with the couple involved. I did so and the paper, having conducted its own investigation, carried the story as its front-page lead. It was also published in the UK edition of the Mail, and then picked up by media worldwide.
I was contacted also by the presenter of an RTÉ television programme at the “human interest” end of the spectrum, who said he had been horrified by the story and wished to cover it also. Otherwise, nothing.
This situation represents a spectacular indictment of Irish journalism. No matter how you look at this story, which began with the losing battle of a father to stand by his child, it is an extraordinary human drama. But also a deeply disturbing tale from the underbelly of modern Ireland, demonstrating how our dysfunctional and brutal family law system has in this instance not just destroyed the relationship between a father and a child, but also, adding gross negligence to its customary brutality, paved the way for another child to be conceived as a result of an unwittingly incestuous relationship.
The story exposes the activity of Irish family courts and might be regarded as a landmark in the uncovering of hidden abuses in Irish life – to be filed, perhaps, in a category alongside the Eileen Flynn, Joanne Hayes and X cases. That it has been ignored by the Irish media tells us that the rottenness of Irish family law has infected our newspapers and broadcasters, which today look away from what is going on, just as a generation ago Irish journalists looked away from the abuse of children in church-run institutions.
The difference between this case and those of Eileen Flynn, Joanne Hayes and X is, of course, that here the intervention by a powerful institution was, in the first instance at least, to the detriment of a man rather than a woman. This insight is vital to any understanding of precisely how the Irish media has been corrupted.
Throughout the 15 years I have been writing on this subject, there has been a consistent effort in the media to suggest that the issue of family court bias is my “obsession”. This interpretation, however, is a function less of my own interventions than of the fact that nobody else in the media has been willing to look into this squalid corner of modern Irish life. And because they are unwilling to do so, it has been vital to insist that there is no issue to be addressed.
One of the cardinal beliefs of the prevailing media ideology is that injustices never happen to men because they are men, but happen all the time to women because they are women. To suggest otherwise is to engage in what the former chief executive of the Equality Authority, Niall Crowley, calls “backlash”.
Such stupidity has no place in journalism, which should at all times be alert to the possibility that its capacity to act as the eyes and ears of society may become corrupted by ideology. This vigilance has ceased to operate in the Irish media, mainly because almost all instruments of journalistic inquiry are now run by people of the same age, background, education and ideological outlook, and who therefore share perspectives on pretty much everything, while insisting – perhaps even believing – that these represent neutral interpretations of reality.
The systematic suppression of the facts about injustices against men in family courts has been effected by a generation of feminist-conditioned journalists, male and female, who began with an ideological purpose and ended up with a self-interested one. For years, journalists have been implicitly directed to ignore or play down suggestions of bias or abuses in these courts. And, because it has long turned a blind eye, journalism has acquired a vested interest in ensuring that what is going on continues to be hushed up – regardless of what in the future emerges about these courts. Thus, Irish journalism is now under this heading infected with the same virus that disabled the generations of journalists of the 1960s and 1970s, causing them to ignore the steady flow of evidence and indicators emerging about the abuse of children in State institutions.
If we wish to understand this past phenomenon, which many journalists claim to find mystifying, we need only reflect on the deafening silence in this society last week concerning the Irish parents whose discovery that they are half-siblings became the talk of the planet.